Frank Deford

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“The Computer Solidly Supports The Way Cook Says Baseball Should Be Played”

October 19, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Long before Moneyball, Earnshaw Cook was, in Frank Deford’s words, the “scholar-heretic” of baseball, a statistician who proved the game’s strategy was backwards. Many of his innovations are common knowledge in the sport today (e.g., sacrifice bunts are usually unproductive), though others are still strangely not implemented. For instance: If you’re in a pivotal post-season game played under National League rules, why not use a relief pitcher who matches up well with the opposing lineup at the beginning of the game, and then pinch hit for him the first time he’s to bat so that you get an extra plate appearance by a good hitter? Then you can insert your “starting” pitcher. Makes sense. Many other of the stat man’s strategies have been disproven, but his underlying message that the sport was being played more from tradition than wisdom was correct.

Deford profiled Cook in Sports Illustrated for the first time in 1964, and while that piece doesn’t seem to be online, here’s the opening of his 1972 portrait, “It Ain’t Necessarily So, and Never Was,” which ran just prior to the publication of Cook’s Percentage Baseball and the Computer, when the numbers whiz went digital:

For more than a decade Earnshaw Cook, a retired Baltimore metallurgist, has been trying to convince baseball’s bosses that playing the sacred percentages is, to be blunt, dumb baseball. In 1964 Cook brought out a 345-page book, Percentage Baseball, that was full of charts, curves, tables and complicated formulas that sometimes went on for the better part of a page. The book dared to suggest that either: a) baseball is not using the best possible odds on the field, or b) mathematics is a fake.

Nothing has happened since to convince Cook that ‘a’ is wrong and ‘b’ is right. ‘As in the world around us,’ he says, ‘baseball offers a completely balanced, highly complicated statistical system, demonstrably controlled in all its interactions of play by the random operations of the laws of chance. As such, it becomes a fascinating illustration of a process readily susceptible to reliable mathematical analysis. Baseball also furnishes a classic example of the utter contempt of its unsophisticated protagonists for the scientific method.’

That last sentence is Cook’s way of saying that the national pastime thinks he is as nutty as a fruitcake. Since 1964 nobody has dared test out his conclusions even in, say, a winter rookie league. Oh yes, the managers in 1964 were named: Berra, Bauer, Pesky, Lopez, Tebbetts, Dressen, Hodges, Lopat, Rigney, Mele, Kennedy, Hutchinson, Craft, Alston, Bragan, Stengel, Murtaugh, Keane, Mauch and Dark. They all stayed faithful to the memory of Connie Mack—but only Alston is still managing at the same major league shop.

Cook has had some nibbles from the baseball Establishment. The Houston Astros approached him shortly after his book came out and inquired if he thought he could apply his figures in such a way that he could make judgments about minor league prospects. Cook said he would try. He checked the player records Houston sent him, and said that his evaluation indicated the two best prospects were named Jim Wynn and Rusty Staub. This was not bad figuring, as Wynn and Staub are probably still the two best players ever to wear Houston uniforms, but Cook never heard from the Astros again. He also got feelers from the Cubs and Phillies, but nothing came of those.

Ignored, Cook went back to his numbers, and this April his second volume on the subject, Percentage Baseball and the Computer, is scheduled for publication. Basically, it is 207 pages of computer proof that everything he wrote eight years ago was qualitatively correct. Well, not quite everything. The computer has found that Cook’s percentage lineup—with the best hitter leading off, the second best batting second, etc.—is, over a season, 12 runs less effective than the traditional lineup.

Otherwise the computer solidly supports the way Cook says baseball should be played.•

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“The Olympics Will Take Us To The Moon, To Mars!”

February 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Thinking about the impact of the Olympics on host cities reminds me of Frank Deford’s great 1970 Sports Illustrated profile of then-Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau whose unwavering will brought a subway system, a World’s Fair, Major League Baseball and, yes, the Olympics to his city. It should be noted, however, that the construction of the Olympic buildings was bungled horribly and cost overruns left the citizens indebted for three decades. The opening:

“One bright day in the summer of 1970, shortly after Montreal had obtained the 1976 Olympics but in the months just before the city annexed Vermont and then acquired the Vatican to place up on Mont-Royal (the Orange Bowl, after all, seemed so lonely up there with only the Bolshoi Ballet and the Ganges River for company), the mayor of Montreal sat in City Hall and faced down another skeptic. This he does with aplomb, for it is a whole world of skeptics that the mayor endures, and thus he has much practice in the endeavor. The mayor’s working philosophy is: ‘Problems are solved en route,’ and, of course, since Vietnam this is not the most popular mode of operation everywhere. The mayor is not deterred.

Having warmed up at some length, he waves for effect and declares: ‘The Olympics will do even more for Montreal than Expo ’67. Seventy-six is only a target, and we won’t stop. Seventy-six is the means, not the end. Sixty-seven was just taking us into orbit, but the Olympics will take us to the moon [he waves], to Mars! I feel it! I feel it! And I’m not wrong when I feel as strongly as this. There is no challenge too big for Montreal, because, like the Olympics, we are acting with the spirit of Baron de Coubertin, we are acting in a humanistic way. The city possesses an environment, an ambience that can be felt. ‘Montreal is en route to becoming The City of the world. Twenty years from now, no matter what happens, it will have achieved this position, and it will be referred to in all parts of the world as The City.’

Now make no mistake, the mayor of The (incipient) City is a politician. His office is testament to that. There is the portrait of Queen Elizabeth juxtaposed with a crucifix. There are the flowers that adorn the room in bunches, while nestled among them is the mayor’s 125-pound bull mastiff, Due, whose elegiac face does not betray the fact that he could eat for lunch, if he were so disposed, all the flowers, the artifacts and the entire Quebec separatist movement. But if the symbols around the man add up to a balanced display, there is no compromise in the mayor. Charles Bronfman, vice-president of Seagrams, Ltd. and chairman of the baseball Expos, observes: ‘However much he sounds it, the mayor is never a huckster. He is altogether sincere. He has drives that are unusual and dreams that others of us cannot understand.’

This means that when the mayor says Montreal is going to sprint ahead and leave crossroads like Paris and New York back with Terre Haute, he is not putting you on. He means it. Also, all those enigmatic celestial references to the Olympics are not being emitted just for florid effect. It is worth recalling that at about this same point in the planning stage for Expo ’67, the mayor had already decided to make a permanent exposition of it—though he neglected to let anyone else in on this revelation for some time. Expo ’67 is now Man and His World and is still drawing people to Montreal.

After a certain amount of watching His Honor, one instinctively recalls what Cassius Clay used to say after various correct predictions: ‘If I tell you a fly can pull a plow, hitch him up.’ The mayor brought a world’s fair to Montreal in record time after Moscow reneged on the project. He lured major league baseball into expanding outside the U.S., and happily watched the team prosper and even play well amid predictions of financial and artistic calamity. He took the Olympics away from the U.S. and Russia and left another world power, personified by Charles de Gaulle, put down in a stunning speech after De Gaulle had suggested French Canada might want to, more or less, separate itself from Canada. He built a cultural palace and a subway system in a world where nobody constructs anything that lasts. With a sprinkle of flowers and trees on almost every street, he encouraged a greenhouse of a town to bloom in a place that had been another kind of house for the whole Western world.

The mayor’s name is Jean Drapeau.”

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“Her System Is Littered With The Residual Effects Of Weight Pills, Water Pills, Hormone Pills, Big Pills, Little Pills”

August 22, 2011 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Jockey Robyn Smith’s remarkably quick journey from aspiring Hollywood starlet to respected professional athlete was the basis of a 1972 Sports Illustrated story by scribe Frank Deford. But her greatest fame was still in the distance, occurring by virtue of an unlikely 1980 marriage to legendary film dancer Fred Astaire. An excerpt from the SI profile of Smith, who was given to telling tall tales about herself:

As a kid she played boys’ games, and certainly jockeys don’t intimidate her because she is, after all, taller than everybody she rides against. “The men jockeys have treated me terrific,” she says, “but then, all my friends have always been men. I resented being called a tomboy, though, because I wouldn’t want to be a man. I like them too much. I just get along with them, period. Women resent this for some reason. My mother used to resent this. Like when she and my father would have people over, I’d hang around with the men.” Robyn always addresses married couples as “you guys.”

She exercises every morning, runs religiously, and indulges herself only in a little wine and brandy. She is a fine golfer, long off the tee, and picks up any sporting activity easily. Ransohoff, the film producer, took her deep-sea fishing. “We hit a school of albacore,” he says, “and I mean they were rolling. Robyn hung more albacore in that hour than any man on board.”

“I’m thin, but I’m strong,” Robyn explains clinically, getting set to flex again. “I always had good muscles. I’m a rare physical individual—and I’m not trying to be narcissistic about it. It’s just that I’m very unusual in that way.”

Yet Robyn has taken off so much weight that she appears to have no emotional reservoir to sustain her. Her system is littered with the residual effects of weight pills, water pills, hormone pills, big pills, little pills, pill pills that she gobbles indiscriminately. Even when she was a world-beater at the spring meeting, she was constantly at a temperamental flood tide. She breaks into tears regularly, not only over losing a race but, say, while watching some banal TV drama. The least aggravation unnerves her. People fall out of her favor upon the smallest alleged slight, only to return just as whimsically to her good graces. Her fetish for freedom borders now on mania; it is easier to schedule an appointment with the Dalai Lama than Robyn Smith. She has become less receptive to criticism, and woe to the most well-intentioned innocent who forgets and idly tells her the same thing twice.•

_______________________________

Smith profiled in 1985.

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“Why Is It That The Most Developed Country In The World Doesn’t Have A Daily Sports Newspaper?”

June 10, 2011 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Grantland, Bill Simmons’ new online venture, has a fun oral history about the The National Sports Daily, a star-making and star-crossed newspaper edited by Frank Deford that burned brightly and burned out too soon in the early ’90s. An excerpt about how a Mexican billionaire started the paper on a whim:

“Frank Deford (Editor-in-Chief): I had never heard of Emilio Azcárraga. Very few people had, despite that he was the richest man south of the Rio Grande.

Thom Potraz (Marketing Director): If you went to central casting and asked for a “Mexican Billionaire,” they’d give you Azcárraga.

Dave Kindred (Associate Editor; National Columnist): They called him … El Tigre.

Peter Price (Publisher): It all started in the spring of 1989. Azcárraga wanted to have lunch. I’d heard about Emilio from Televisa, the Mexican media conglomerate, because I was in the media business, as well. I’d become publisher of the New York Post when Peter Kalikow bought the paper from Rupert Murdoch for $37 million. When I took over in 1988, there was a strike going, the circulation had plummeted, and the advertising had disappeared. We had the challenge of rebuilding. At lunch, Azcárraga started one of the strangest conversations of my life.

Emilio Azcárraga (Died in 1997. Lunch conversation recalled by Price): I read a comment of yours that the Post is unique among all American dailies in that it has many more male readers than female readers. You attributed that to the fact that the Post was a newspaper for women and a sports paper for men.

Price: The ladies like our gossip; the guys read it backwards and hardly ever get to the front of the newspaper.

Azcárraga: That’s what I want to talk to you about! Why is it that the most developed country in the world doesn’t have a daily sports newspaper? We’ve got one in Mexico. The Italians have two. The Brits have tabloid sports papers. L’equipe in France is reigning strong, and Japan has a sports paper.

Price: There are only three national newspapers in the United States, and only one is a purely national paper with genuinely national distribution. But USA Today is going on almost a decade, a billion dollars in losses, and it’s supported by a major publishing company. To do a national sports paper from scratch without the backing of a major publishing enterprise, without having a delivery system, without having regional printing plants, without having a brand name, and without any staff is not for the fainthearted.

Azcárraga: I think it’s a good idea. What would it take? Why don’t you give that some thought and come down and visit me? I’ll send my plane.”

••••••••••

Deford, Roger Angell and George Will discuss baseball’s home-run explosion in 1998 with Charlie Rose, whose head resembles a catcher’s mitt:

Another Frank Deford post:

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‘The One Time I Really Got Hurt Was In Honolulu. I Was Fighting This Girl, And She Must Have Gotten Me With Her Fingernail.”

December 10, 2010 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Derby women take a leap during the sport's first heyday in the 1950s, when it was a TV staple.

In addition to a million other things he’s done in his amazing career, the legendary journalist Frank Deford was a pioneering writer about roller derby. I’ve seen Five Strides on the Banked Track, his out-of-print book about the roller sport for sale online for anywhere from $55 to $700. That volume grew out of a 1969 Sports Illustrated article of the same name. Deford was fully aware of the feminist appeal of the pseudo-sport and its then-greatest star Ann Calvello, whom he profiled. An excerpt from the article about Calvello:

“‘The one time I really got hurt was in Honolulu. I was fighting this girl, and she must have gotten me with her fingernail. I didn’t even know it was my eye till all this blood came pouring out, so right away—this one time—I went to the doctor at the hospital, because eyes are the one thing I don’t want to fool around with. Well, the doctor took one look at me, with the blue hair, the blue lipstick, the red blood pouring out of my eye, the green-and-gold uniform, and he had to figure I was straight into Honolulu from outer space.’

Frank Deford was the editor of the short-lived, much-lamented sports daily, "The National." (Image by Bridgeport Public Library.)

Little escapes Calvello. The acid comment she spills forth is the product of her wit and is not related to the meanness that she exhibits on the track. She is certainly a leader by any standard, astrological or otherwise. As soon as she reaches the bar with her silver chalice she is in charge. She directs the conversation, sometimes two conversations at a time—the one she is dominating and the adjoining one that she overhears. She distributes nicknames to everybody. She outlaws shoptalk. ‘No skating talk while drinking’ is the first Calvello law.

While she is hardly just another pretty face, Calvello is still slim and attractively winsome after 20 years on the tour. She dresses exceptionally well and is able to get away with wearing youthful clothes that most women her age would be afraid of. Divorced many years ago from a former Derby referee, Ann also likes her men young. On the tour, in the company of Eddie Krebs, a wistful, temperamental Leo himself, Ann sparkled, particularly when the other skaters kidded Krebs that he was starting to look 40 and Calvello 20. Krebs, slim to start with, had lost almost 40 pounds on the tour. With his handsome, chiseled face, long page-boy hair and a haunting high-pitched giggle, he and the blue-haired, hoarse-throated Calvello made a couple that seemed straight out of an avant-garde French movie. It was the only tour romance.”

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